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Paloma Polo

Born in 1983 in Madrid, Paloma Polo’s work generally tackles the relationship between forms of power and Knowledge. Her artistic practice explores subjugated knowledges that can inform the history of knowledge production and the construction of humanely progressive political discourse.

Polo’s projects are founded on comprehensive multidisciplinary research endeavours. In her earlier undertakings, various interests converged in the relationship that science and technology have with economic, social and political developments insofar as they facilitate and instrumentalise them and in the way that such relationships can be explored and known. For her project The Path of Totality, Polo embarked on an investigation of the expeditions to observe solar eclipses that various Western powers carried out since the mid-nineteenth century. Although these expeditions were apparently in search of purely scientific results, the political networks that made them possible were based on power structures that acted according to the logic of expanding Western institutions and markets; in other words, a colonialist and imperialistic logic.

In recent years, her endeavors progressed alongside a continuing immersion in the Philippines and in zones of unrest. These explorations were prompted by the following question: If it is true that we define our futures as antithesis of the present, how does our understanding of the architecture of power inform, or perhaps encroach and compromise, the way we conceptualise the future?Polo’s work emerges as a verification and necessary re-writing of history, by means of an articulation of methods to think and proactively confront our contemporaneity.

Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and in group exhibitions, including the 55th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Between 2007 and 2009 she pursued an artist’s residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam and in 2010 was in residency at the Gasworks in London. In 2013 she was tenured as a visiting research fellow at the Center for International Studies, University of the Philippines Diliman, Manila, where she continues her engagement and work.